HP Workstations, HP Networking enable efficiency
DreamWorks Animation tapped the power of HP Z Workstations to recreate the thrill of the Indy 500, with a snail traveling 220 miles per hour and more than 500,000 crowd characters filling a replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

HP Z800 and Z820 Workstations, powered by Intel® Sandy Bridge Xeon® E5 processors, enabled artists to execute iterations 50 percent faster than previous workstations and develop increasingly complex camera angles and special effects. When not in use by creative teams, workstation processing power was used to run night time rendering jobs, contributing to the millions of compute hours needed to produce the movie.

HP Networking provided animators with access to a central repository of assets, simplifying collaboration by allowing artists to easily share and retrieve resources across all locations. In addition, the highly reliable network infrastructure allows creative teams to work anytime from anywhere, with production spread across studios from Glendale and Redwood City, Calif., to Bangalore, India.

HP Converged Cloud services and servers boost processing power, scalability
The production of “Turbo” required 75 million render hours to create fully realised images, including 32 Indy 500 race cars and 32 million crowd character instances, the most of any DreamWorks Animation film to date.

DreamWorks Animation utilised HP Enterprise Cloud Services to provide a robust, scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that offers the additional compute power needed to render the 10 CG films that are in production at any given time. HP Enterprise Cloud Services, part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, enables DreamWorks Animation to meet growing business needs while remaining within its existing data centre footprint.

To handle the rendering demands of “Turbo,” DreamWorks Animation relied on the high-performance computing capabilities of HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers. HP ProLiant Gen8 servers increased render throughput by approximately 40 percent and performance per watt by approximately 42 percent,(1) allowing DreamWorks Animation to render an average of 500,000 jobs a day to ensure that the studio had the compute power to complete the production on time.

Secured backup and archiving with HP StoreAll 9730 Storage allows artists and engineers to protect and conveniently access the 230 terabytes of files that make up “Turbo,” in addition to the studio’s other films and production assets.